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Bing Ads: Should They Be a Part of Your Advertising Campaign?

Google is dominating two-thirds of searches in the United States in 2014, per ComScore’s latest Digital Future report.

So why should you bother with advertising on Bing and Yahoo!, whose synergized ad network manages to muster a (relatively) measly 29% slice of the search pie?

Why not?

If you have a little flexibility or a little extra budget, experimenting with Bing Ads has the potential to pay off nicely. Some of our clients regularly receive a nice portion of their paid conversions from this source.

Though She Be But Little…

Unconvinced? Okay, so maybe I would not stretch to describe Bing Ads with Beyonce’s favorite adjective. But, you could certainly be missing out on a chunk of potential leads by ignoring Bing and Yahoo! searchers (whomever this rare breed may be). As we mentioned above, Bing teamed up with Yahoo! to provide a cross-platform solution on both networks, from one source.

• The Yahoo! Bing network draws 5.5 billion searches per month, globally • This represents 29% percent of the search market • Combined, the Yahoo! Bing network puts you in the potential path of 168 million unique pairs of eyeballs • The buying power of the Yahoo! Bing network users actually exceeds AdWords customers – 123% of the Internet average versus 118% for Google • Year-to-year clicks on the network are up 30%; mobile clicks are up a staggering 133%

It’s a Google World, We’re Just Searching in It

Right now you may be thinking, “All right, cool, but is this really worth the learning curve?” or “Great, but what’s my potential ROI for adding this into my strategy?”

With Bing and Yahoo! lagging behind in a volume-driven marketplace for driving searches, they really do not have a choice other than to follow the trail Google has blazed in terms of user experience expectations.

This goes not only for end-user search processes, the driving force of all this ad revenue, but also purchasing processes for agencies and businesses in this multi-faceted business model. A July article Robert Hof wrote for Forbes backs this up quite nicely.

Spreading the Paid Search Love

Best of all, Bing has pretty good resources for your reference on the entire process. They are committed to improving the service and recently announced a round of system improvements in their blog.

Yahoo! has been making updates lately as well, most notably Ms. Mayer’s push for developing a portfolio of digital magazines. These are meant to host streamlined, inconspicuous native advertisements and keep eyes on their pages for longer. Read more Yahoo! Advertising updates here.

Ultimately, the metric with which your decision should be gauged is cost per lead. If you can spend $1,000 on AdWords and gain more conversions (after a grace period of optimization), then by all means the switch would not be worth it. In the end, though, you might be surprised!

What are your thoughts on Bing Ads? Have you used this service successfully for yourself or your clients? Let us know in the comments.

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